Blood Meridian

It's been a busy few months for me, so I haven't been very diligent about updating this blog. And that probably won't change any time soon. But here's something:

A few months ago I appeared on KCRW's Bookworm, with Michael Silverblatt. You can listen to it here. Towards the end of the interview, he took me to task for being too coy, basically, trying to point the reader in the right direction when he would rather be taken by the hand and led there. This is something I've been thinking about a lot ever since. I kind of have a problem when writers make their points in too heavy-handed a manner, though maybe fear of doing that myself causes me to tend too much toward the overly subtle.

As an example of something that I think of as too heavy-handed for my tastes, take BLOOD MERIDIAN, by Cormac McCarthy. There's much that I admire about this book, though overall I find it a mixed bag. The diction is often great: the "tang" of a gun, for instance, or a door "awap" on its hinges, but then he'll use a word like "pyrolatrous," which I can't imagine fitting the voice of either any character or the hypothetical narrator. There are some wonderfully tense scenes, but there are also lots of scenes about nothing more than riding past scrub oaks or acacias or dwarf cedars or some other type of shrubbery. But what I want to talk about here are the tense shifts. The voice of the book is mostly past tense, but it begins in the present and is prone to alternating between the two with no warning.

For instance, there's a scene near the middle of the book in which Glanton's band are sitting around a fire during a break in their usual savagery. The Judge (the "villain" of the novel) is sitting there, sketching in his book:

"In his lap he held the leather ledgerbook and he took up each piece, flint or potsherd or tool of bone, and deftly sketched it into the book. He sketched with a practiced ease and there was no wrinkling of that bald brow or pursing of those oddly childish lips. His fingers traced the impression of old willow wicker on a piece of pottery clay and he put this into his book with nice shadings, an economy of pencil strokes."

This is a fine, quiet scene. But then suddenly, mid-paragraph, the tense shifts from past into present to inform the reader that the Judge "is a draftsman as he is other things, well sufficient to the task. He looks up from time to time at the fire or at his companions in arms or at the night beyond." And then back to past tense. The shift serves a purpose. You can't help but read those lines as more important than the lines on either side. But isn't it too much? I mean, I get it; he's not just devilish, he's the devil, and the fire is the fire of Hell and his companions in arms are the demons of Hell, and the night beyond is outer darkness. But emphasizing it so directly pulls me right out of the moment. It would have been much stronger, in my opinion, to keep it in the past tense, subtler, let the attentive reader catch the Satanic undertones without turning the amps up to 11. Which is also my problem with the last proper chapter of the book, in which, [SPOILER] the Judge emerges naked from an outhouse to kill the Kid, and then he dances naked in the tavern while someone plays the fiddle. It strikes me as too much. Kind of like this moment in Dr. Seuss's FOX IN SOCKS, which happens right around the 7:00 minute mark:

But I did!

I don't know, though. Maybe there's something to be said for being direct: something admirable about just unabashedly putting it all out there. As Morrissey says:

Cormac McCarthy may be shy, but he definitely isn't coy.

Game Theory

Okay, I'm going to cheat. This isn't something I wrote specifically for the blog; it's something I wrote a few months ago, for another venue, that wound up falling through. Also, it's not about looking closely at a text. But it's been a busy few weeks, and while nothing could be better than a proper post, this is better than nothing, so—therefore—this is better than a proper post. Right? Anyway, here we go:

In August of 2013, I participated in a game from SCRAP Entertainment called “Escape From the Mysterious Room” in San Francisco’s Japantown. The premise is simple: Eleven people are locked in a seemingly ordinary room—complete with tables and chairs, carpet, bookshelf, coat-rack, wall hangings, etc.—and are given one hour to get out. Almost no instructions are provided, but almost all of the items in the room hold secrets, and part of the game is figuring out what sort of questions to ask: Where are the clues that will lead you to the key that will ultimately unlock the door through which you entered?

I first learned of the game when a friend of a friend posted on Facebook looking for people to join him in his own attempt to escape. I was on the wrong coast at the time, but the premise seemed so odd that I decided to do a little research. The first “Real Escape Game” (“Escape from the Mysterious Room” is but one of several puzzles that SCRAP has put together) took place in Kyoto in 2007 and was masterminded by SCRAP’s founder, a 34 year old man named Takao Kato. He apparently was disappointed that real life wasn’t filled with the sort of adventures that he read about in novels and manga, and so he decided to create such an immersive real-life experience himself. The result was so successful that SCRAP now has five permanent Real Escape Games in Japan, along with one each in Shanghai, Singapore, and San Francisco. It surprised me that such an odd concept could spread so quickly, but I was even more surprised when I read about the low success rate; from the beginning the games had been designed such that fewer than five percent of participants would escape. It was a hugely popular game in which most of the participants happily lost. And that’s when I decided I wanted to play.

I’ve always been competitive; this isn’t a trait of which I’m particularly proud. We all tend to see ourselves, somewhat solipsistically, as the centers of our own narratives, and moments of exceptionalism, whether reached through skill or luck, only reinforce this view. Whether we beat a friend at chess or win a coin toss, the thrill is similar in kind if not degree. And the sense of loss can be just as meaningful, casting us as the heroes of tragedy rather than triumph. But the Real Escape Game was at least a cooperative experience; the reviews all promised that only teamwork would get us out of the room in time, and this seemed to make the promise of winning at least slightly less solipsistic a goal. So I decided to assemble a team.

At the time I played the game, only nine teams out of more than four hundred had ever managed to escape over the course of the nine months in which it had been running. I brought along seven friends, among whom numbered a musician, a cryptographer, a comic book enthusiast, a mathematician, a game designer, a statistician, and a last-minute wild card who had no idea what he was in for. Upon arriving at the building, we were joined by three strangers: a couple from Japan as well as another young American man, a game enthusiast, who had come on his own. We all introduced ourselves and donned lanyards with nametags, and then, after being led and locked into the room itself by a Japanese woman who provided us with one cryptic clue, we proceeded to work together and separately to find a way out.

Over the course of the hour allotted—overseen by two game administrators—the eleven of us flipped around in books, disassembled furniture, solved riddles, and rummaged through every conceivable space in the room in which a clue might be hidden. With perhaps five minutes left on the clock, we managed to make it through a locked door into a smaller, second room, where one final puzzle awaited us. Knowing we were running short on time, we frantically groped for solutions, making wild intuitive leaps, until—with about ten seconds left—we had the key in our hand and rushed to the exit, all ran out of the room, and gave ourselves a cheer as we were greeted by the woman who had ushered us in. She seemed shocked that we had made it. And then one of the administrators followed us out of the room and swiped a hand across his throat: “They didn’t do it right,” he told her.

Back when I was a high school senior, I was the captain of our Science Bowl team, and during the regional finals we found ourselves playing against a team that seemed to be at least our equal. It was a double-elimination competition, and though we hadn’t lost a single match going into the finals and the other team had, they managed to beat us in the first round. And, halfway through, the second round seemed as if it was going to go the same way. Forget beating them, we were having a hard enough time buzzing in before them. My teammates were growing disheartened, and though I knew it might seem like a desperate move, I also knew we needed a change of momentum: on the next question, I buzzed in as soon as the moderator said “Multiple choice.” He cleared my buzzer before proceeding, but then I buzzed in again, and I told him that I wanted to answer. After a brief consultation with the judges, he allowed me to respond, though no question had yet been asked. “C,” I said. The moderator reviewed the question and found that “C” was, coincidentally, the correct answer. I never found out what the question was, and my answer didn’t in itself win us the game;—but it did grant us a bonus question that put us in the lead, positioning us to go on to the national finals, which we eventually did. Even so, I still question whether it was fair.

More recently, I found myself engaged in behavior that was even more ethically questionable. A few years ago, I divorced, but I started playing poker on a semi-regular basis with a guy whom I knew through my ex-wife. I hadn’t played cards in years, but at the time I was mostly just looking for an excuse to see people, along with an excuse to drink. But then in the middle of one otherwise normal game, realizing how easy it would be among such friendly and unsuspecting opponents, I decided to cheat. I’m not sure where the motivation came from. I’m not the best card player, but I was generally able to break even on the average, and this was a small-stakes game, so it definitely wasn’t about the money. I wondered for a moment if it could somehow be rooted in my divorce, but the correlations were tenuous at best. The best answer I could come up with was that I was bored, realizing that beer and poker weren’t as fulfilling as I’d hoped to find them, and I wanted to see if I could get away with it. And I did. When the deal came to me, I quietly stacked the deck and managed to take a hand large enough to make me the clear winner for the night.

I tried to avoid poker for a while after that for fear that I’d be compelled to cheat again, but when my friend called me up and pled with me that they needed one more player to make a game, I gave in. And I did indeed cheat again, though with less success; I may have been reading too much into the conversation, but I became convinced that one of the other players was suspicious of my luck, and I left the game feeling low. The feeling persisted over the following week until I eventually decided to come clean about what I’d done, returning a rough approximation of my winnings to those I’d taken the most from. But rather than stemming from any sense of responsibility to those I’d wronged, I now think this admission came from a sense of having failed myself: that I hadn’t cheated well enough. As if I’d answered B instead of C during the Science Bowl.

Back in the escape room, everything seemed so much clearer: we’d escaped the room in under an hour. But according to the proctors, the game wasn’t just about escaping; it was designed to make you solve all of the problems in order to escape the room. And that’s what we didn’t do: We’d failed to solve the final puzzle. In fact, we weren’t even close. As our collective euphoria settled into some sentiment between confusion and disappointment, one of the game’s designers came out to meet us and discuss what had happened. We explained how we escaped the room, and he explained how we were supposed to have escaped the room, and then an awkward silence ensued.

Without giving too much away (the designers of the game understandably want to keep as much under wraps as possible), we made a huge mistake, reversing one of the means by which we were supposed to come to the solution, and then we used our nonsensical answer to come up with a four-digit lock combination that was coincidentally only one digit away from the correct combination and which caused the lock to pop open as we passed the correct solution on the way to our incorrect one. But as the comic enthusiast put it, “Isn’t luck always part of the great narratives?”

The designer told us that two groups had escaped “incorrectly” before, but they had both used brute-force calculation, systematically trying every combination on one of the room’s four-digit locks, rather than even attempting to play the game. Their escapes hadn’t counted, but he left the question up to us if we really thought that we deserved to be added to the record as the tenth group to have escaped the room. We decided to put it to a blind show of hands; despite the odd number of us, it was a tie; after a brief moment of confusion, one of us admitted that he had abstained. There seemed to be no clear answer to the question: Whether we had won or lost depended on each of our definitions of winning and losing. A brief discussion made it clear that the abstainer had no intention of changing his mind, but even so we eventually decided to vote again. The first time I had voted that our escape should count; the second time I changed my mind. The game designer obviously didn’t want it to count, and anyway, I got what I came for: not only the sense of elation I felt when we left the room, but the sense that I’d done it as part of this group of both friends and strangers. Whether we all felt we deserved our place in the statistics was beside the point. I figured I'd won the game I was playing, so why not let the designer win the game that he was playing too?

DFW (Part II)

Last time (I know I said this second post would come "tomorrow," and sorry, this is a long tomorrow), I gave some context to my reaction to David Foster Wallace's "Incarnations of Burned Children"; this time I'll try to stick mostly to three aspects of the text: capitalization, point of view, and title.

The first thing I notice on my third read of this story is that the main character is called "the Daddy." Or, I say he's the main character because he's the only character whose interiority is given any attention, at least until the very end, but then maybe that's not enough to qualify him for that role. There's also another character called "the Mommy" and a third called "the child." Weirdly, even though capitalization typically signifies central importance, here I think that it's being used to suggest that these capitalized characters have no importance apart from their relationship to the third, non-capitalized, character; they are to be taken, perhaps, as archetypal. The story hinges on a terrible thing that happens to their child, so in some ways this makes sense, but to me it also feels a bit distancing: these aren't characters who matter in and of themselves, even though most of the story's emotional weight is supposed to be carried by them. Which brings me to the next topic: point of view.

For most of the story, the voice sticks close to "the Daddy," which is why I earlier suggested that he's the main character, but just as the capitalization stuff suggests otherwise--pointing to the child as the main character--so does the fact that the story ends with an unexpected swerve to a close third-person narration of the child's later life. And that's something I want to look at closely, but first a minor tangent, as earlier, there's another weird swerve in the POV: "The tenant side's door outside hung half off its top hinge and moved slightly in the wind, and a bird in the oak across the driveway appeared to observe the door with a cocked head as the cries came from inside." This moment is weird because it's unclear, for instance, to whom the bird appeared to be observing the door. It's as if the story has shifted to some impartial, imaginary POV. Something that would have been the case if there had been someone there to see the bird. But in the story there isn't. All I have to say about this is: huh.

Anyway, that latter POV shift is just weird, but the former (shifting from the Daddy to the child) is actually my big problem with the story. I think I would love this story if it stuck with the Daddy and was just about his reaction to the horrific O. Henry-esque twist of what the child is actually going through. Though in this case, I think the capitalization would have to be reversed: the daddy, the mommy, and the Child. But the story, as is, seems to want to get to the broad opening outwards of exploring the child's later life, and the consequences of this one horrific event. And I think that that's great. The story has a great ending. But it's an ending that isn't set up or earned by what comes before, because what comes before, despite the capitalization, isn't about the child at all, but is just about the Daddy.

So I'm torn on this one. I think the first half is the first half of a great story. And the second half is the second half of another great story. But they don't fit together well.

I do like the title, but I'm not sure why: "Incarnations of Burned Children." I think I would have gone with "burnt" over "burned," as the former seems more like an adjective and the latter more like a past participle, to me, but that's just my own weirdness. But what I really like about the title are the plurals. Incarnations (Latin for "en-meat-enings") and children. But there's only one child in the story and only one incarnation of him immediately apparent... Even so, I like the way that the plural makes me question how it might point towards a broader significance.

Sorry for the lack of videos this time. Also, I didn't ever get around to the story of how I once wrote a book called INFINITE JEST. Eventually. But this has been a weird post, and it was weirdly difficult for me to write. But I figure it was best to get it out of the way rather than leave it unwritten. Next time I'll try for something more fun.

DFW (Part I)

I started this blog four weeks ago with the plan to post one piece a week; obviously I've fallen behind. I knew that I'd be going on my book tour for BAD TEETH last week, but what I didn't realize was that I would simultaneously be dealing with the very early arrival of my second kid, Petra Barbauld Durfee Long (born April 7 and doing very well). So maybe I'll play catch up and post more than one piece this week. We'll see.

Anyway, Petra's arrival has me thinking back to the arrival of her older brother Quentin a couple years ago. And soon after my wife gave birth to him, while they were both still in the hospital, I decided to reread "Incarnations of Burned Children," by David Foster Wallace. That was a bad idea. It really upset me.

It upset me because I was newly a father, and the story is about parents who fail a child, so at the time that sort of worry just hit a little too close to home. Understandable, yes? But this was the second time I read the story, and I didn't like it the first time either. So I decided to read it again yesterday to try to get some sort of handle on my reaction to it.

Now, this blog is mostly supposed to be devoted to close reading. The crux of the first post could be boiled down to a paragraph break. The crux of the second could be boiled down to the use of the second person voice. And I'll get to a close reading of "Incarnations of Burned Children" in my next post. But first a bit of context:

I mostly like the work of David Foster Wallace. I think that he was a great thinker and often a great writer--particularly in his essays, but also in his fiction. His fiction is full of great writing, in fact, but my main problem is that I feel that it often doesn't come together well. INFINITE JEST, for instance, seems more like a collection of riffs on a theme than it does a novel. And most of the riffs are amazing, but a few are downright embarrassing (that ghetto-speak chapter is the worst offender, but it's far from the only offender). His short stories are hit and miss; "Lyndon" is probably one of my top ten favorite short stories of all time, but I find "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" almost unreadably bad. His essays are pretty universally great, though. But maybe I'm not the ideal reader.

I think I was born at the wrong time to fully appreciate DFW. By the time I discovered him, I had already discovered his influences and was trying to synthesize them in my own way, and our respective modes of response put us at odds in my mind. He still managed to influence me, to be sure; the use of quoted ellipses to signify a pointed silence in ICELANDER, for instance, was ripped directly from his work; and the book I'm writing now has some Q. and A. in a format taken from "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." But I think if I were born a little later he would just be among those influences that I had discovered as opposed to being someone else who was influenced by them, and I would probably look at his work in a different way. And if I'd been born earlier I might have seen him as a contemporary grappling with the same influences and topics as me. Instead, I saw him as someone who was ten years out of date (obviously I was better at interpreting the modern world, as I was younger; hey, I was an undergrad) and someone who didn't have the formal rigor of Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, or any of the other postmodern writers to whom he was often compared (again, I was an undergrad)...

But anyway, this post is getting long, and splitting it in two is a good way to play catch-up on the low post-count. Preview for next time:

The use of capital letters! Poignant details and the issue of POV! The importance of a title! Also, the story of how I once wrote a book called INFINITE JEST!

Tomorrow, I hope.

See you soon.

And welcome, Petra.

"Critique de la Vie Quotidienne"

I'm a big fan of Donald Barthelme; in fact, I'd say he's my absolute favorite writer of short stories. As is the case with Denis Johnson (see my previous post), I first discovered Barthelme in college, through a friend, the difference being that I loved Barthelme immediately. And so, an aspiring collector of books (on a limited budget), I made it my mission to find every mass-market edition of Barthelme's original collections over the course of my four years in school.

There's a lot of greatness to be found in any of Barthelme's books. "The Balloon" (from Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts), which is probably Barthelme's most famous story, might come off at first as little more than an exercise until you get to the end, which explains why the titular balloon was built and which suddenly, gut-punchingly, makes the whole thing personal. "The School" (from Amateurs), which George Saunders has written about as an exemplar of "rising action," is, to me, an exemplar of hilarity. It details a series of deaths as experienced by a grammar school class: plants, goldfish, etc., but it reaches the level of laugh-out-loud funny when it gets to the Korean orphan that the class has chipped in to adopt. My favorite story by the man, though, is "Critique de la Vie Quotidienne" (from Sadness). And what really makes that story work for me is its use of person (as in first, second, third).

[Tangent: They Might Be Giants's first video single was for a song called "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head":

It's an okay song from a band that would go on to do much better things. But what I like most about it now is its use of person. I'm not sure if it was an intentional structural device or not, but the verses of the song move from second ("As your body floats down third street...", to third ("Ads up in the subway are the work of someone trying to please their boss..."), to first ("Quit my job down at the car wash, didn't have to write no one a goodbye note..."), and the overall effect reinforces the message of the song. The narrator moves from a projectional "you" to an empathetic "he" to an empowered "I" taking control of his life: "putting his hand inside the puppet head." But I digress.]

Back to what really makes the Barthelme story work for me, though: it's not what comes at the end (as with "The Balloon"), but what comes at the beginning. The story is (basically) about the dissolution of a marriage, narrated by an alcoholic husband/father. But early on, we get this:

'Our evenings lacked promise. The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man. There is nothing to do but go home and drink your nine drinks and forget about it.

Slumped there in your favorite chair, with your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array, and your hand never far from them, and your other hand holding on to the plump belly of the overfed child, and perhaps rocking a bit, if the chair is a rocking chair as mine was in those days, then it is true that a tiny tendril of contempt - strike that, content - might curl up from the storehouse where the world's content is kept, and reach into your softened brain and take hold there, persuading you that this, at last, is the fruit of all your labors, which you'd been wondering about in some such terms as, "Where is the fruit?"'

And it goes on. There's a lot to like here. For one thing, it's funny ("Where is the fruit?")! But what I love is how it starts out with that general "you" (that's just what one does when one is in this situation), and it slips occasionally back into the first person ("if the chair is a rocking chair as mine was in those days"), but as it goes on (and it goes on), the "you" becomes more and more specific, reading almost like the "you" of a Twist-a-Plot or an Infocom game, which you start to find a little disorienting:

And then at some point (again, pretty early on), it becomes clear to you that the "you," no longer abandoning the second person, is actually a mask for the "I" that started this whole thing to begin with. But shifting the person is a way of reaching out, perhaps, seeking a connection, trying to force another person to identify with him (or me, or you?), if only for a second, despite the clinical tone that generally characterizes the story. It's fitting that this comes from a collection called Sadness.

Also, I try at one point to rip off this sort of effect in Bad Teeth, which came out yesterday. Obligatory plug.

"Car Crash While Hitchhiking"

So I'm starting a blog about stuff I've read. Here we go.

I first heard about Denis Johnson when I was in college, 1996 or 1997, I guess, and I was playing a Beat Happening song called "What's Important," from 1982, for a friend:

That song contains the lyrics:
"We sit by the window and we watch the rain
Each little drop has got a name.
They're falling down, they're hitting the ground.
They're washing all the people away."

My friend told me that the song reminded him of the story "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" (1992), by Johnson (Denis, not Calvin), which contains the line, "I knew every raindrop by its name." I liked the Beat Happening lyric, so I decided to check out the story.

For the most part, I didn't like it. It felt fake from the opening lines:

"A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping . . . A Cherokee filled with bourbon . . . A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student . . .

And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri . . ."

Today, I read the story again. Seventeen years on, I can find things to admire in this opening ("captained" as a verb choice, for instance), but it still rubs me the wrong way with all the ellipses and especially that overly-dramatic paragraph break. It all feels as if it should be read by Bruce McCulloch in the voice he uses in the "Doors Fan" sketch from The Kids in the Hall:

Particularly when McCulloch says, "An old lady on a bus sucking humbugs, she's a rider on the storm, but she ain't never heard the sounds." That seems to me like a line that could have come out of Jesus' Son.

The line about the raindrops, though... When I first read it, I thought it was just the sort of thing someone would say to try to seem cool, like the pretty but ultimately meaningless poetry Roy Batty spouts at the end of Bladerunner. Reading the story again, half a life later, I see it has a bit more weight. The raindrops have names but the people don't, and it's but one of many moments when objects take on traits that are "more human than the human" (to reference Bladerunner again), culminating in the box of cotton balls that speaks to the narrator. But it works better in the Beat Happening song.

What I liked most about the story this time around, though, was this line: "my pulse marked off the seconds of time." "Seconds of time" defamiliarizes a simple concept. It almost sounds like something a person who speaks English as a foreign language would say. Like, "How many dollars of money should I pay you?" But I like that sort of wording that slows me down and makes me pay attention.

I'm still not the biggest fan of this story, as it mostly seems to hinge on the fairly simple dramatic irony that the innocents rather than the sinners are the ones involved in the car crash, and it's all a bit too overly dramatic without much sense of humor about itself. But I like it more than I did when I first read it, and I may finally get around to reading more Johnson despite the initial negative impression.

Also, I think it's funny that in Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice there's a character named Denis whose name rhymes with "penis."